Last year, I decided to try a little experiment. I wanted to have a custom link shortener for the blog. This is a fairly simple thing. Buy a domain, like kel.life, and then hook it up with something like bit.ly and you’re good to go. I went with GoDaddy because I’ve used them before and never really had any problems. You can usually buy a domain fairly cheap for, at least, the first year.

I used mine a ton during the year that I had it but I decided that it just wasn’t worth it. My blog doesn’t make any money and GoDaddy started sending me renewal notices that had conflicting prices in them. I logged into my account a week ago and stopped the auto renewal for everything. Well, I thought I did. Turns out, even though I got a confirmation that everything had been stopped, it wasn’t. GoDaddy adds something they call “domain protection” that stops you from easily cancelling a renewal. If you don’t turn this off first, the renewal won’t actually be stopped. Needless to say, I was surprised (furious) when I got an email informing me of a $68 renewal fee from GoDaddy.

If you’re thinking that you can just call GoDaddy and kill the domain and get your money back, you’d be wrong. They can’t kill the domain because of the protection thing. So, the only thing that customer service can do is walk you through shutting off the domain protection and put you on hold while you wait for that to kick in. Once all the systems recognize that the protection has been shut off, you can delete the domain, customer service will take you off hold and initiate a refund for the renewal you didn’t want to begin with.

Up next? Delete the GoDaddy account because fuck that company, right? Wrong, you can’t. Deleting your private information from their systems violated their privacy policy. But you can go into your account, delete all your credit card information, change your name, address, email, phone number, everything, and then get a hysterical email confirming all the changes. They don’t change the info immediately, which is how the confirmation email comes through.

Anyway, I’m done with GoDaddy and I’ll be using the generic link shortener that comes with my MeetEdgar account.